Over the past few years, Jonas Bonnetta has used the time in between touring and performing as Evening Hymns to record his first full-length ambient album, All This Here. The record began as the score to the documentary film Strange And Familiar: Architecture On Fogo Island which follows the story and construction of the Fogo Island Inn and a series of artist studios on the island designed by architect Todd Saunders. "I was given a bunch of footage from the production company to put music to and was really drawn to that desolate landscape and Saunders' architecture," says Bonnetta, "It still feels like a dream project to me. Getting these images from the filmmakers and being totally free as far as music goes. I'd put the landscape footage on loop and just play with sounds in my studio, trying to match the pace of that place. I wanted the music to float. There was so much water footage in the film and I really wanted to have some connection to that."

All This Here sounds like a record of dawn and dusk, of light that frets at the edge of the day. The album finds field recordings from the coast of Fogo Island echoing throughout the record, horns which glisten into strings or shimmer apart into the rumble of the surf. Forlorn murmurings suggest some alloy of whale song and cello, while particles of recorded footfalls collide in the vacuum of wind or woodwind and cold, watery piano tones. The recordings were captured partly in and around an artist cabin perched over the ocean on Fogo, on the Easternmost tip of Canada, and partly at Bonnetta's Ontario countryside home studio, with the help of Anne Müller (Nils Frahm, Agnes Obel) and Mika Posen (Timber Timbre, Agnes Obel) on strings, and mastering by Philip Shaw Bova (Feist, The Belle Orchestre).

Bonnetta is sharing "Little Seldom", a song which gets its name from a town on Fogo Island, as do all of the tracks on All This Here. " I had wanted to capture the pulse of the water around Fogo Island and also wanted to make sure that there was an element of fiddle music on the soundtrack," says Bonnetta. "I scored out all of the violin sections and then went to Ottawa to track the strings with my friend Mika Posen. Her parents had this amazingly deep collection of folk music that we were able to sift through including a bunch of LP's of Newfoundland fiddle music. I still really hear all of that on this recording."

The result of Bonnetta's time capturing the architecture and environment of Fogo Island is something that feels more found than constructed, a buried memory recovered whole, embedded with sounds from the island and music inspired by that beautiful place. Currents merged into a single, sprawling field recording, a map of physical and emotional landscapes in superposition. Each tidal movement flows into the next, and arrangements wash themselves away, slowly exposing the haunted, haunting spirit of a place that exists only for a moment.

Bonnetta will celebrate the release of All This Here with a special performance at The Drake in Toronto on May 27. Joining Bonnetta on stage will be Edwin Huizinga (Tafelmusik, Yo Yo Ma, Wooden Sky), Mika Posen (Timber Timbre, Agnes Obel), and Adam Saikely (Acorn, Telecomo).

The StanfieldsPhoto Credit K.T. Lamond

Scrappy Halifax rockers The Stanfields released their latest album LimbolandMarch 23 through Groundswell Music, so now they're bringing it live to the peeps with late Spring dates in Ontario and Quebec. Limboland is The Stanfields' fifth album and sees them take an unflinching look at the negative forces that threaten rights and liberties, all while doing it with their trademark swirl of guitars, pounding drums, fiddle and rowdy energy. "There's so much going on in the world, there's so much uncertainty, I think it's important that we're speaking in a really clear voice," says lead singer and songwriter Jon Landry.

This is the first album for the group since 2015's Modem Operandi, and the first to be recorded with the two newest members of the band, fiddler Calen Kinney and bass playerDillan Tate. "Bringing the new guys into the band really gave me and Jmac (guitar player Jason MacIsaac)and Murph (drummer Mark Murphy)the license to take a stop and reflect on what we had donemusically up to this part," says Landry. "To say okay, let's go full-circle here, let's harness these young guys' energy to be okay doing three-minute songs again."

Along with Limboland's current single "Desperation," a highlight of the album is "Lantern In TheWindow," a classic East Coast image but in this case, it's about making sure we offer hope and safety for anyone being repressed or in need. As well,"Total Black" sees the group joined by fellow Nova Scotians Cassie and Maggie MacDonald, winners of this year's Traditional Album of the Year at the Canadian Folk Music Awards. Maggie joined Landry for shared lead vocals, while Cassie played twin fiddles with Calen. Fired up, speaking out and rocking harder than ever, Limboland is The Stanfields at their very best.

Austin, Texas based Okkervil River have released a new song and video "Pulled Up The Ribbon," the second new track from their forthcoming album In The Rainbow Rain, out 4/27 on ATO Records. The epic and esoteric video, directed by Christopher Good, follows the band as they embark on a mystical journey that seems to transcend time.

Watch "Pulled Up The Ribbon" here and feel free to share:

"When I first started working on 'Pulled Up the Ribbon' I felt really excited about the melody and the chords in a way that made me nervous because I felt pressure to write lyrics for it and nothing seemed quite right," says bandleader Will Sheff. "I started with something quite dark and violent, and it felt like a good direction but I kept hitting creative dead ends. And then I realized there was something in the melody and phrasing that seemed like it was about destruction and doom but also something else that felt like it was about creation and birth. So I decided to try to write a kind of praise song for the force behind all of those things

The song started as a waltz ballad, briefly turned into a Motown-style number, and then we streamlined it and Will Graefe added that hook. I had heard some of the great vocal performances on our keyboardist Sarah 's album with her project Lip Talk and knew I wanted her to sing on the song, and she elevated it further. When I took the song to Shawn Everett to mix, he stripped out a lot of the padding from the track and made everything more aggressive and skeletal, with the drums and bass way up in the mix, the beauty amped up but also the spooky stuff. This was the only one of Shawn's mixes where there were no notes, no tweaking. He played me the track and I said 'whoa' and approved it and we moved on."

"It's such a sweeping, rousing, almost elemental-sounding track," says Good. "I immediately thought of the rock beach in Rockport, Massachusetts' Halibut Point State Park as an appropriately evocative backdrop and then from there just let my mind wander!"

Jeremy Dutcher is a classically trained operatic tenor, composer, activist, and musicologist who takes every opportunity to blend his Wolastoq First Nation roots into the music he creates, blending distinct musical aesthetics that shape-shift between classical, traditional, and pop to form something entirely new. Dutcher has just released his debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa.

Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (wool-las-two-wi-ig lint-two-wah-gun-ah-wa) finds Dutcher exploring, reworking, and collaborating with the voices of his ancestors which he discovered and transcribed from turn-of-the-century wax cylinders.A member of Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, Jeremy first did music studies in Halifax before taking a chance to work in the archives at the Canadian Museum of History, painstakingly transcribing Wolastoq songs from 1907 wax cylinders.

"Many of the songs I'd never heard before because our musical tradition on the East Coast was suppressed by the Canadian Government's Indian Act," explains Dutcher. He heard ancestral voices singing forgotten songs and stories that had been taken from the Wolastoqiyik generations ago.

As he listened to each recording, he felt his own musical impulses stirring from deep within. Long days at the archives turned into long nights at the piano, feeling out melodies and phrases, deep in dialogue with the voices of his ancestors. His "collaborative" compositions on Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, are like nothing you've ever heard. Delicate, sublime vocal melodies ring out atop piano lines that cascade through a vibrant range of emotions. The anguish and joy of the past erupt fervently into the present through Jeremy's bold approach to composition and raw, effective performances enhanced by his outstanding tenor techniques.

Shelia CarabinePhoto Credit Jason McGorty "I'm doing this work because there's only about a hundred Wolastoqey speakers left," he says. " It's crucial for us to make sure that we're using our language and passing it on to the next generation. If you lose the language, you're not just losing words; you're losing an entire way of seeing and experiencing the world from a distinctly indigenous perspective ." Last year, Dutcher spent some time on the road with the New Constellation's tour. Hosted by Jason Collett, the music and literary tour travelled to cities, towns, and Indigenous communities across the nation, featuring a core roster of Indigenous artists alongside a rotating cast of some of the country's most celebrated musicians, writers, and poets.

Dutcher will spend some more time on the road this Spring and Summer, with stops and festival dates throughout Canada.

BITS'N'PIECES So not Spring yet but love sure is in the air. Herewith, three singles opining on that precious commodity from three very diff artists.

Knash

KNASH are a six-piece party-punk band from Stockholm Sweden, whose new single Lame in April, is a poke at lame people who ruin one's life. The single comes with a b-side that deals with the shitty dudes at the club and the execution draws inspiration from vintage Riot gurrrrlz, edged with Eurothrash shredding and snotty humor. Ideal tour mates would be Nashville's Daddy Issues.

Live, Love, Laugh is from the reinvented (Frozen Ghost) Len Mizzoni, a blues/rock workout full of brio, with a ragged ass funky spine which matches perfectly with the scuffed up and heartfelt vocal. Slick, but never too much so, jazzy guitar lines mesh with rattling rootsy percussion and some tasty synth intrusions so by the end, you could be dancing Legion Of Love aka Brent Haynes has dropped a Remix of protest anthem Love Is The Answer, in which the instrumental urgency is dialed back to make room for the centrepiece lyrics. This take is more in a soft rock vein and a tad more mainstream, good for its singalong potential. Translations of the title in a number of languages makes for a clever bridge.